My thought process for doing nice things is that I believe everyone should do the same, and being exemplary is the least I can do. I don’t really believe my own little deeds matter much in the grand scheme of things, but I hope they do, because I like that idea. In other words, I have faith in that idea.
That, and I can bicker about people who don’t without being a hypocrite.
I will state up front that I didn’t read any of the article, but I stand firm in saying “Because they are lazy and disrespectful.”*
*I realize there may be some times when a person is not able to return a cart. You are allowed occasional lapses.
I ALWAYS return the trolley to the receptacle, and if when I get there the trolleys haven’t been nested inside each other, I do this also. But since I’ve been buying my groceries online and having them delivered it’s been a while since I’ve had to deal with a trolley.
I guess the thought of people with back pain, or other borderline handicap limited mobility never crossed your mind?
When I threw out my back, walking was painful…I didn’t have a sticker.
But the idea of walking even an extra 10 yards to return the cart after shopping and unloading groceries was out of the question, usually I had to sit in the car and breath a bit before I even started it up and drove off.
Too many points to quote here, but…
I agree. What, again with the misunderstanding of the broken windows fallacy? This isn’t remotely what Bastiat had in mind, and as an analogy it’s way off base. There’s no deliberate breaking-to-fix here, no attempt to create a good from a bad. At worst it’s a justification.
You’re certainly right that cart wrangler isn’t a full-time job, so the justification is weak. By the same token, the amount of effort involved is small enough not to get worked up about. In the end, it’s (part of) a job that gets done every day and would not be significantly affected if the carts were marshalled into corrals or not. It’s a triviality.
Here again you’re equating a “breaking” act with a neutral one. There’s nothing breaking about putting a cart in one place vs another. There simply can be no moral high ground here. It’s a ridiculous overcharging…
It isn’t an argument at all. It’s an opinion. And further in my opinion, this is hardly a matter of manners or etiquette. It’s just life on the lot. Some people care, others don’t. Being a “carer” doesn’t make you right or even better, it just means you have a different outlook.
Well, if that’s your standard there is no end to the good you can do in the world. Me, as long as I’m not actively trying to make someone’s day worse I feel like a saint.
That doesn’t address the logical question I posed. If it’s wrong to leave the cart outside the corral, why isn’t it just as wrong to leave it outside the store? When did the line get drawn at the corral? How is the use of a corral determinative of goodness or laziness or any other moral quality?
I really don’t have a strong bias one way or the other here. I mean, sometimes I corral a cart, sometimes I choose a cart that hasn’t been corralled, sometimes I sneeze into my sleeve. None of this rises to the level of sin and none of it justifies the moral posturing and indignation of some commenters here (not citing you, just… well, read it all).
I’ll take my cart to it’s spot in the lot… but anything more than that is putting someone’s job at risk. that “poor sod” is paid to collect the carts and perhaps that job is perfect for the skillset of that individual. same reason why I won’t do self-checkout. it’s usually four registers for one employee… that’s three cashiers that should’ve had work.
Wow. You’re a very good typist for someone who must be pushing 180 years old, to have spoken to Bastiat and gotten to ask him exactly what he had in mind.
So, how is saying “If everyone returned their carts, cart wranglers’ jobs wouldn’t exist” much different from “Everybody must live, and what would become of the glaziers if panes of glass were never broken?”
So, do you admit that, for the people currently wrangling carts, that their time would be spent making your shopping experience better if they didn’t have carts to wrangle? Because when you said before that they wouldn’t, that was based on their job not existing, which you now admit it still would.
So are most matters of manners and etiquette. “Please,” and “thank you,” and “you’re welcome” are the most trivial of trivialities. The first is a mere indication that the choice to decline exists, a fact which is usually obvious; the second is a payment of a mere two words in exchange for some deed, which surely cost more effort than such a reward did; the last is a statement that a task presented no serious difficulty, and, as such, the requester should feel free to repeat their request in future. These are all stating the obvious: “You may decline;” “What you did is appreciated;” “You may ask again.” Trivialities.
And yet upon such trivialities are civilizations built. Those three phrases, for example, are key to making a request while maintaining a friendship, because, by the first two, the requester tells the helper that they do not wish to impose upon the friendship, and the last tells the requester that they haven’t imposed.
The fact that something requires a trivial amount of effort doesn’t render the consequences from that effort trivial.
Please tell me: what is your distinction between littering and abandoning a cart? What is one “breaking” that the other isn’t? Both are taking something you’ve moved and made use of, and both are leaving that thing in a place where it doesn’t belong, for someone else to deal with because you can’t be bothered to deal with it yourself.
The only two differences I see are: one, the cart, being larger and owned by the store, has a better chance of being collected and placed where it belongs, and two, the cart, being larger and sitting in a parking lot, has more chance of hitting (or being hit by) something and damaging it.
You’re certainly right about having a different outlook than I do. I regularly made the promise as a child that I would do a good turn for someone every day. And, I admit, to my shame, that there have been days when I’ve broken that promise. But I believe that those small good turns from the days when I haven’t broken my promise have added up, and made at least a few people’s lives better than they would have been otherwise. Even if those actions were “trivial.”
Because, once the stores introduced the corrals, the carts belonged there. At no point did the carts belong in the middle of the parking lot.
It’s not determinative of anything. Wearing a trilby isn’t determinative of being a douchebro. But it is highly indicative. If someone is willing to pawn a simple, trivial task onto someone earning minimum wage, that in itself doesn’t mean anything about that person, but it’s a good indication that that person might have a world view where, to put it in the simplest terms, their time is worth more than anyone else’s.
The issue isn’t whether or not we’re providing or preventing work for a cart wrangler. The idea is that once you’re done transferring your groceries from your cart into your car, how do you dispose of the cart? If you put it in a corral or take it all the way back to the store, the issue is resolved. If you do not, you’re leaving it out in the parking lot, and very possibly blocking a parking space until some cart jockey wanders by. That might be 6 seconds from now, it might be 15 minutes from now, depends on the staffing of the store and their policies and priorities. Certainly the store management knows how often people just leave the carts sitting wherever they emptied them, and one hopes the wranglers act accordingly. But why not put in a bit of extra effort anyway, just so the next customer to drive in isn’t hampered by your cart just because Jeremy Cartman took an extended smoke break? It’s a cool thing to do.
just make everyone deposit a quarter to get a cart like Aldi does… I never see abandoned carts in the Aldi parking lot but often see people handing off quarters to those returning their carts.
amazing what that shiny little coin will get people to do
The reality that I remember is that young men at the Piggly Wiggly used to artfully pack your groceries into paper bags, load those into another cart at the register, then push the loaded cart out to your car, and load the groceries into the car for you. You would then give them a dollar, and they would take the cart back into the store.
But that was an elegant practice, for a more civilized age.
This was my experience, even in the middle of a broiling Florida summer afternoon it was lovely to escape; but then I was put out and raised as an outside cat at an early age.
Best day ever at that job was when an old lady backed into me and knocked me down. Just enough blood spilled I had the cashiers fawning on me and wanting to take care of me all afternoon.
Our grocery store wanted us to carry the bags on our arms, like waiters do. You only used the cart if it exceeded four bags.
Meh.
Personally, I return my carts when I’m done; usually by riding on the back bar:
Hell, on my way in, I even politely “stalk” people who are clearly headed to the cars for their carts; (especially when it’s one of the convenient mini-carts that seem to be in ever dwindling supply at my local grocery.)
When I originally read the title, I thought it was referring to people who take the cart out of the grocery store parking lot and use it to take their goods to their home, then discard it nearby.
Neither do any of the vending machines at my work. It’s very annoying.
Take the keys out of the ignition, maybe?
That’s been the system around here (Krautistan) for the last 25-30 years, and it works quite well. You can use coins (usually 1€) or tokens of the same size (or a washer if you’re really into DIY). A lot of companies, charities or political parties hand out tokens as promo material. Oddly enough, this once led indirectly to the resignation of a senior minister.
Yes and no. I don’t want to talk to strangers face to face mostly (unless they have four legs and a tail 
) but I do round up carts and a few times I’ve rescued someone’s full cart that started rolling away while they were dealing with their trunk situation. I don’t really spend any thought on why the carts were left where they were though.
I’ve found my keys in the upstairs bathroom. I don’t have kids, just kitties. I probably left the keys there but I don’t have any reason to have my keys out in a bathroom. I mostly assume cart abandoners have similar reasons.
People don’t have to wait until the grocery store to indulge their inner child either. 
One of my coworkers used a magnetic pen set to build a sculpture at her desk. Do something “silly” every day. Start at once a week if it seems daunting.
That is an interesting alternate perspective on the coin system. Perhaps it isn’t the calculated loss of a quantity of money so much as it is mentally marking something of value to set the memory/habit in place.
So I should feel free to take a shit on the restroom floor of McDonalds because it’s someone’s job to clean it up?
